Emma Haynes

2017 March 27

by PULP

Emma Haynes moved to Greater Manchester in 2007 to work as a graphic designer within the education industry. In contrast to the child and education-friendly artwork she produces on a daily basis, Emma feels her personal work emulates her style and personality more veraciously.

“My fascination with sketching coarse, moody images with biro, was first inspired by a love of the illustrations found in graphic novels, and was first evoked whilst studying graphic design at University. Over time I have adapted this style of drawing into what could now be considered a form of portraiture.”

The majority of the work has been created using her own photographs, a biro and Photoshop. “I am always looking for new opportunities to recreate photographs with my own style and have been commissioned on occasion to do just that, which is quite exciting.”

Through seeking ways to refresh and further develop her style, Emma has tried different methods in Photoshop and has more recently focused on drawing photographs as vector images, using Illustrator. This has resulted in a very different yet distinct style.

Emma is also a fan of photography, and since moving up North has relished in Manchester’s cloudy skies that break once in a while with brilliant sunshine. “Manchester is without a doubt an amazing place to capture that ’sunshine after rain’ glow. On such days, the modern architecture is what fascinates me the most. The moody Manchester sky provides a bright and deep blue backdrop that brings new life and depth to the buildings. That, for me, creates a feeling of a utopian fantasy. I hope to embody the same deep, moody and almost melancholy feel to my photographs as I do with my sketches and portraiture.”

Emma is currently compiling a new collection of ‘mirrored’ images from these photographs and is hoping to exhibit them some time within the next year. “I am excited by the disorienting, hallucinatory quality of these images, and by the fact that I am conveying a new dimension with my photographs.”

If you would like to see some more of Emma’s illustration or photography, go to:

This really describes Emma’s work, of which I know well, she is able unlike some graphic designers to integrate her ability to portrait subjects individual personality in her work yet still keeping an essence of fantasy, Emma has worked hard over many years to develop her uniquely different techniques.

I am sure Emma if given the opportunity would become one of the top most known illustrators in her specialist field. She has the ability to illustrate and design exactly what the client wants, as she has experience, a mature understanding of human nature and intuitively knows what the client really wants. I would recommend, ‘Design by Pie’, to anyone wanting to market or display their products or capture a lifelike image of their friends, family or pets.

I commissioned ‘Design by Pie’ to come up with a 2006 Christmas card for ‘Retters Business Services’, my strap line was ‘Targeting Business Solutions’ and the company logo was a dart board with a gold arrow in the bulls eye. Emma produced up to 6 designs within a week all of them very inspiring, but the one I chose was a dart board surrounded by holly and Ivy with wrapped overlapping leaves making the edges of the dart board soft, but not in anyway taking the logo out of the design, recognizably a card from ‘Retters Business Services’, on receiving the design it was fully prepared for the printers to run off without the usual margin problems, Emma’s work with a large printers in Newport has paid off, my customers thought the card was very seasonal and different, I entered it in to BNI Gloucester local small business Christmas card design competition and of course it won!